Memorial March and Gegner Barber Shop Controversy in Yellow Springs, Ohio (Part A)

Find out HOW. W-why Also Radio new. You want to go in Jackson Mississippi just to grab a gun and get in the trenches. That's the only way to meet the problem. But on the north and Ohio it is a far more sophisticated problem. George. LUCAS. Wy a slow news now presents a special report on civil rights activity in Yellow Springs

Ohio. A memorial march and legal ramifications of the Yellow Springs barbershop controversy. It was a quiet September Sunday in Birmingham Alabama. Churches were filled with worshippers. Suddenly the Sunday quiet was shattered. A bomb exploded in a packed Negro church. The explosion ripped through the building when the smoke cleared for small negro children lie still they were dead. Victims of a cowardly bombing. The deep south is a place of racial turmoil. Bombings of Negro homes and businesses have often made headlines during recent months and just as often they were forgotten soon after they occurred. But somehow the September 15th church bombing in Birmingham Alabama was different. For small negro girls were dead. World opinion was shocked. A blight was cast on America's position as the moral leader of the world's democracies. And the American conscience was stirred. The nation was ashamed of the vicious act. It felt sorry for the innocent Negro children killed in the church bombing and for their parents.

The next Sunday September 22nd the American people gave visible expression to their sorrow in the streets marches were held in large cities and small towns across the land to mourn the four Negro children killed in the church bombing and Yellow Springs Ohio was no exception. A march was scheduled for Sunday afternoon around 1 o'clock Yellow Springs residents dressed in their Sunday best began gathering at the tennis courts behind Antioch College in a few minutes. The march got under way. The marchers walked silently in double file to the front and rear of the procession were Yellow Springs police cars with headlights ablaze as if they were going to a funeral. In fact many of the marchers wore black funeral arm bands. The line of march left the Antioch College tennis courts and headed for senior Avenue Yellow Springs Main Street. This reporter was on the scene. They work here in Yellow Springs to mourn the death of the Negro children killed in Birmingham Alabama last week got underway shortly after 1:00 o'clock this afternoon

and intimated around of 350 strings were. Working in the mine. They started down behind the Indian College near the court. They're marching down senior Avenue with the most. They're marching silently. Many wearing black armbands the file in the liner Yellow Springs resident students and many children leading the procession are several negro ministers pastor of Antioch College and Jim Lane who is an editor on the Dayton Daily News. In the background you heard the Church of the Presbyterian Church. Church bells unfeeling for 15 minutes or more of the Negro children killed in that church bombing in Birmingham Alabama. There are many similar marches like this going on across the country today. It doesn't probably exactly like this one.

The marchers passed down the main street of town through the business district and then headed down a residential side street. The mile long march terminated at the Yellow Springs municipal building. Leaders counted four hundred thirty two Yellow Springs residents in the line of march. Included were local ministers corporation executives and village officials. At the village municipal building a memorial service was held for the four Negro children killed in the Birmingham Alabama church bombing. A local Methodist minister Reverend Franklin Holt delivered the invocation save the brownest beginning. On that unknown. People that one has created now an image yet again oh God we have assembled here remembering those that have passed this day that all of the people might be won.

As we come this afternoon however the father to remember our brothers our sisters and I are they gone to worlds unknown and for what reason they are gone. We actually would torch the hearts of those dead are still here on this side walking on plain grounds. They may realize this sense of by heavenly love and benediction and of the love of Christ Jesus who died for our sins. Bless us as we can on this day striving arsenal that may be able to walk through the shadows of death. A pose that may fear no evil. And then we always remember that now with us we are blessings upon the world over the sake of the afflicted those that have gone to world are no

less type people as they come to be at this hour. These and other blessings we pray and acts in Jesus name. Whilst on I thought us to pray and call the Our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come. That would be done I think as it is in heaven give us this day our daily bread and forgive us all it just passes as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. But I understand them. And the glory. Amen. After the invocation was delivered by Reverend Franklin hold Walter Anderson professor of music at Antioch College led the marchers in singing We are the cause. We are called.

We told the owner of. A song. It was. The true spirit of truth. Lol. Oh my. PS. of. All Panama. We all love.

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me mute it comes. Loaded the soldier the. Oh oh oh oh oh. Yeah oh oh how low the load and every home was loaded. Having no use hollow them out of. The. Soldiers. Oh oh oh oh. Oh oh. The. Oh.

As the memorial service continued Kate Howard the editor of The Yellow Springs news introduced the main speaker we have with us today a newsman who has been in Birmingham. And in the. Other most troubled spots of our nation where the battles for. Freedom and equality have gone on in these recent months. James the famed. The editor of the. News. Is a native Georgian. Educated. Brought up in Georgia. Before he came to date in about 10 years ago. He served as the news editor and editorial writer on the

staff of the Lada Journal. Earlier he had been. Working newspaper man in Albany Georgia along with his visits to Birmingham. He has in the past few months been in Albany in Montgomery injection and. Those other most troubled areas. The results of his visit and talk there he gave to us and his newspaper the Daily News a few months ago in a series of articles which I hope most of you have read. I'm sure that on this day when we gather. In mourning. Over the deaths. Of four little girls in the struggle. For equality and freedom we can have no one better talk to us than James E. Fein the editor of the Dayton

Daily News. Three years ago in western Germany someone decided it would be a good idea to have the play The Diary of Anne Frank performed. And it was performed on another of a number of German cities. It opened simultaneously and several was in various traveling companies putting it all in a very interesting phenomenon happened. And each city at the last curtain. There was no applause. And the audience sat in complete silence for about 10 minutes before leaving the theater. It didn't happen in just one place it happened and the brown man and stood guard. A number of other cities in western Germany it became a pattern. No one ever applauded that play.

People sat at the first table I'm thinking about this felt that dust was a fine thing because it indicated there was a consciousness in the people of Germany of the things that they had done to the Jews during the Hitler regime. But later some second thoughts cropped up and these second thoughts had to do with how much is it possible for a person to find a home for guilt. Expiation first just by realizing the enormity of the crime and perhaps for a mystic just might be enough. We are a pragmatic country with a pragmatic tradition and we are in action as people. It is not enough to realize the depths of sand or to be sorry for it. It is not enough to

be breasts altering hands because of things that have been done. I think that. Perhaps our first conscious lesson I overhead in. Race relations. I grew up despite. Being in south Georgia somewhat insulated from the race hatred or prejudice for some years at least as far as I can remember when I was about 12 years old. I went to work one summer in the drugstore of an uncle on a little town called Lyons Georgia which is right down in the heart of a rural part of Georgia and there was a young negro boy about my age who was a delivery boy and I was a soda jerk and we became good friends. We played catch up behind the store in the afternoons and there was a man I know now an ex and now know what kind of person he

was when you're that young you don't judge adults much. And I suppose if I was a cute Klux Klan chapter around he belonged to other and if not he would join whatever comparable thing there might be. He persuaded me as a practical joke once to put an egg on my friend's cap and put it on his head in such a way that it broke and I thought I was some sort of funny until I saw look on the boy's face. You see there was nothing he could do to me he was a better athlete he could've left me easily in a fight which a white boy in a comparable situation could have done. But he had no recourse on that society and that time against me and the situation. And when I realized that I was a dream is shamed and felt very guilty and I tried in a number of ways to make an apology.

And that's just embarrassed him and he would accept it in a way we never really communicated on it. And it wasn't until a long time later that I realized that his problem with me was not a personal one and that what I had done to him was not exactly a personal firing. But you see I was a part of a very real problem for him and making my peace with him on a personal basis really was an irrelevancy. It really had nothing to do with the guilt that I had. What you want is not a for a specific situation that brings about such insanities as a church bombing or cowardly murder of Medgar Evers. It is for an environment in which these things happen as a sort of an extreme and psychotic manifestation of many other things happen as well. And if any of us find expiation by being sorry or by trying to establish a

personal relationship we're begging the question and begging the issue at some point really is some part in Jackson Mississippi where I spent a couple of days a summer that is here in Ohio. But in Jackson it's necessary. It's a war situation and you're relieved from all of matters of personal choice and conscience just as you are when your nation declares war unless you happen to be a pacifist. The only thing to go in Jackson necessary is to grab a gun and get in the trenches. That's the only way to meet the problem. But in the north and Ohio it is a far more sophisticated problem and the ways of doing things of Moutet are different. More difficult more complex. And that color that rarest of all qualities intelligent persistence and trying to move closer to the American dream. I don't have to recite for you the problems we face and often the problem of de-facto

segregation which you have moved beyond and this community but which is true in my city which brings in its train discriminatory educational facilities the problem of employment. Which is not just at the hiring level but at the advancement level. The problem of social discrimination which does not lend itself really to governmental attack or organized attack. But I think it is appropriate at a time when we are in mourning and when we get close to home our elemental selves and thinking about the problem of racial democracy in this country. I think a little bit about what we need to do in these areas to realize that bringing down these barriers is not so much a

matter of demonstrations. Not so much a matter of any of the kind of things that lend themselves to emotion as it is persistent intelligent read lit by good people against apathy and vested interest and the maintenance of the status quo. I don't think justice and tali a matter of fair employment legislation or fair housing legislation all of these are essential things that must come quickly. But I think when we get further into of them we're going to find that they involve also some massive change within the educational system. It's a massive change within business practices and within trade unions and once we get into some of these things I think we're going to

find that. Real racial democracy requires sacrifice from people who never realized before that they had to sacrifice. You see the word liberal has become a dirty word to many people and the Negro movement and understandably solve some of the impatient people in the Negro movement and I don't blame them one bit for being impatient. Going to hurl that word liberal into your face in a way that makes you think you know how ever you just copped out for being a political liberal when it didn't really cost you anything are not very much. But if we do begin talking in times of extensive revision in the educational system for disadvantaged people of all races if we do require new approaches to apprenticeships Well then unions then I think that people who have been far left

liberals on the racial question will find themselves moving into some tough choices. I think it's about time that we started to examine some of those in this country. I think the battles that lie ahead in this area have not really been thoughtfully considered at Gettysburg Lincoln said Let us here resolve that these honored dad are not in vain. And in a larger sense I didn't. But reconstruction was largely lost for the Negro in this country and and civil war with all its bloodbath did not accomplish many of the things that were considered to be at stake. I sat in the office of a man by the name of Hollis. Back in June who is the executive secretary of the White Citizens Councils of America

and he said we regard this racial trouble now as a second rate construction. It took us 40 years to when the first and we're going to win the second. And he has going for him. And they have on that side of the question going for them. The tremendous and nourish the status quo and the reluctance that most of us feel to help our own but don't go low level parts of life disturbed especially when it affects a pocket nerve. Now I suggest that the real question and the racial revolt of 1963 is not the drama of a Jackson all of Birmingham so much as it is the sort of the N word resolve with persistence that people have good people throughout the country to try to

guarantee that we do bring about in the psycho reconstruction a true racial democracy and real emancipation has never taken place. It's going to take place only the minds and hearts of people are changed not just stirred. Agony of the South today is going to be whole. And out of it come the really dramatic manifestations of evil on which we can fast. But we are just beginning to experience. And then all of a kind of upheaval that goes with the establishment of a better democracy. And we're not going to have many marching banners really and I hope we're not going to have too many tragic incidents around which to rally the

horses of good in the saying that is happening. I think that we are faced with the really difficult challenging problem of intelligent persistent relentless attack on a broad series of fronts without battle flags are martial music are answered. But on the calm hand use really that better life for all that type of cultural enrichment which is possible and which is our heritage. And if we can derive out of today and out of this coming together and sorrow and shame a little bit of courage and a little bit of persistence

and I want a bit of perseverance and maybe also a little bit of communion and understanding then I think this can be a great as well as a sad day.